Buying either Snow or Desktop TI - Noob Questions

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My first post here so please be gentle

I have been on the fence with the whole Virus thing for a while now and after trying every VST I could get my hands on, I just cant seem to find anything suitable for what I am looking to do. Mainly pads, plucks, chord progressions etc. in the various House genres (Electro/Prog/Trance etc.) is what I am speaking of. I've yet to find a VST that can do really clean filter sweeps through the whole range... all of em seem to have dirty aliasing, distortion artifacts etc. (Sylenth, Omnisphere, Dune, Diva etc. just dont cut it for me). But with the Virus, from user demos I have heard the exact sounds I am after, so I decided that a Virus is a must for me. Now I need some help deciding which model - Snow or Destop TI? I've already got killer beats, bass and FX covered with VST's and analog hardware synths, so everything else a Virus can do is just a bonus. I should also add that most of my work with the virus will be done inside my DAW (Ableton) -no midi keyboard, so the TI aspect is a must.

My main question is (and I have searched everywhere for weeks trying to find an answer to this) in relation to playing chords... with the Snow using typical House music pad like patches (I hate to use this example, but for ease of description think mau5 like chord pluck sounds), a little delay and verb, some basic cutoff/res/adsr tweaking/automation, how many notes are realistically possible? 3-7 at the same time no problems at all? Or is the Snow with the limited polyphony/4 parts not really capable of this and the Desktop is needed for this type of work?

I would really appreciate it if someone here could describe some realistic scenarios of use, the limitations and what to expect with the Snow.

Cheers!